Creative Perspiration

I wrote my first long piece of prose in seventh grade. I had aspirations of novel writing before that, but at twelve years of age, I wasn't really prepared to actually do it. In seventh grade I wrote a twenty-page handwritten science fiction story, which I was allowed to read to my English class. Looking at it now, I see it was impossibly bad, with tropes from every science fiction book I liked, inconsistent characterization, and a hefty dose of "thesaurus disease". Still, not a bad effort for a seventh-grader.

Creating got me through my junior high and high school years, when I was constantly world-building and storytelling in my head, sometimes in the middle of classes. I was a lonely kid, and peopled my world from my imagination rather than friends. I would especially get inspirations for my many worlds when I was walking the mile+ to and from school, or when I was on my paper route. It was a creatively fertile time in my life.

In eighth grade, I decided to work on another project. This one was very ambitious. I was finally determined to write a Novel.

I got myself a second-hand manual typewriter (home computers were still a few years away) and set out on my journey to become an Author. And, like many beginning authors, I relied on inspiration to strike while I wrote. It did. I wrote what were essentially highlight scenes, full of action and what I then considered to be snappy dialogue. Ironically, though I was at the same time writing fairly good image-filled poetry, I tended to skimp on descriptions, though I wrote quite a bit of tedious exposition in order for the reader to understand each new plot. When I ran out of action for a scene, I went to another scene. The problem with this was that I ended up having some fifteen or so sub-plots, because I couldn't make one plot last long enough to get to what I considered novel length.

I tended to let my inspiration strike as I wrote, which led to a certain amount of stream-of-consciousness writing, as well as not working on days when I wasn't inspired. The worst end of this hit me the week I did become inspired and wrote seventy (yes, 70) single-spaced pages in a week. I learned then why it's not a good idea to write seventy pages in a week. I put my book up and couldn't stand to look at it for about six or seven months.

Eventually, I did finish it. I began revising it, because as I wrote, I began to see flaws in the work that were pretty significant. A lot of these flaws were conceptual; as I matured, I began to see a "They don't like me because I'm different" minset -- one which I had internalized in my own life -- was a much more nuanced issue than a simple matter of right or wrong. And the revisions began to teach me a bit about the work that goes into writing a book.

In and around a few other short stories, I finished the third revision of that novel in college, and reluctantly laid it aside, because it was clear to me that, despite the fact that my technical writing had improved, the concepts could not be fixed without a significantly better understanding of writing than I currently had. By then I had AP English and Rhetoric under my belt, and could write a tight and good non-fiction paper almost without trying. I knew by now that creative emesis was a very poor way for me to sustain writing, and decided to see what could happen if I paced myself.

I chose to write four handwritten pages daily, whether I felt inspired or not. And that was, I think, my first real experience with creative perspiration.

You've heard the famous phrase by Thomas Edison, "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration," haven't you? I'd say the ratio may be a bit different in a artistic endeavor, but the main point is accurate for writers at least; being able to produce polished, completed works is not a product simply of inspiration, but is a matter of a good deal of very hard work.

I tend to think of fiction writing as a marriage of two different parts: the art and the craft. The art includes inspiration; those moments when you meet a new character who fills a role you hadn't realized was open; the point at which all the plot threads spontaneously come together in one climatic scene; that description that says exactly what you wanted to say, in a way you didn't previously know you wanted to say it. The craft is the part which tells you how to write varied sentences, how to use dialogue tags and alternate them with character movement and expression, how to set up paragraphs to achieve maximum impact on the reader -- the nuts and bolts of writing in other words.

The craft isn't very sexy, but it's tremendously important. For every writer who relies on pure inspiration to know each word to write -- and does it well (and I confess that there are a few) -- there are at least dozens, probably hundreds of authors for whom that strategy creates poor prose. Learning the craft won't give you inspiration, but it will enable to help you put down your inspiration into beautiful, readable ways.

And that's where creative perspiration comes into play. I discovered, when working on those four pages daily, that those places that I used to want to skip over, those places that needed description, detailed action, motivation, and characterization, were just the places I worked on when I paced myself. I had to come up with something on those days I wasnt inspired. And so I wrote filler. I wrote little descriptive scenes and detailed action sequences. I paid more attention to what my characters were thinking and feeling. I finished that novel and began another. I was growing happier with what I was writing, even though it wasn't anywhere near the level I wanted to achieve.

Slowly, this sort of work began to increase my creativity and my inspiration. When I was working daily, my creative muscles unlocked, and I would see connections between the painstaking work I was doing and the overaraching plot. I would better understand how my characters fit into the story, and how their motivations and actions might serve the story I was trying to tell. And I began consciously noticing the themes in my own work, which helped me to work with them. Inspiration, craftwork and perspiration began to intertwine and reinforce each other.

I don't always love writing. Sometimes I hate it. But this first experience with craftwork and pacing taught me a lot about how it's easiest for me to write. Post-college I had a long, dry spell, and only completed a few (not that good) short stories. I joined a writer's group, where I learned some useful technical things, but didn't find it worked quite as well for me as it did for others in the group.

(I actually recommend workshopping, but it's desperately important to find a group where you are 100% comfortable with the fit. A poor fit can cause you to have less motivation for writing, a good one causes you to have more.)

I took my writing back up in my mid-thirties, and lit into the half-finished novel I'd left from college. I paced myself with a set amount of words per day. Creative perspiration. And I discovered that I had turned into a significantly better writer.

I've gotten better since then. I wrote a number of other novels and quite a few short stories. I found myself a writer's workshop that suited my personal style. I started publishing short stories a few years after going back to my craft, and in the past five years turned out a novella, and a full-length novel (Etched in Fire) last fall. I'm well into a sequel novel, and have another that I'm going to be seriously revising for publication (I hope). I have a novel and several short stories in the hopper to be written and/or revised.

And I'm discovering that my craftwork includes so many other facets: revision, workshopping, plotting, research, and studying the writings of those books I love to figure out how other authors create the effects that make them compelling stories to me. I collect inspiration and hoard it until I can use it in an appropriate work. It's no longer just about pacing, but about crafting my inspirations into stories I am proud to let others read.

I still rely on inspiration. Inspiration is what tells me what to write. Craftwork is what tells me how to write. But creative perspiration is the effort I go through in order to connect the art and the craft, and make sure there are words on my computer, rather than blank virtual pages.

I've stil got a lot to learn. I'm still honing my craft. And I would never tell anyone else that my way is the only way to write. If another author does everything entirely opposite of what I do, and it works for them, then they are successfully navigating their own art, and it's not for me to disagree. But for me, it's about creative inspiration being funneled through craftwork by the engine of creative perspiration.

And I'm happy with the result.